AWS Elastic Beanstalk features are designed to make running an application on the Amazon cloud as fast and simple as possible. These make it ideal for a variety of apps, including those that require highly variable amounts of traffic.

EB stands next to other AWS services like EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancers, and Auto Scaling, and allows you to modify and configure these to adapt to your application needs.

Time to check out the features available to Amazon Web Services Elastic Beanstalk users, and how they can be used to rapidly and easily deploy cloud powered applications to the AWS platform, manage, maintain, and monitor them.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk features

Elastic Beanstalk provides several features that ease deployment and management of applications on the amazon Web Services platform. Organizations using the service also have integrated access to other AWS cloud services like Auto Scaling and CloudWatch, for increased reliability and security of their applications.

Let’s look at the key features of the Elastic Beanstalk platform.

Application support

A service like Elastic Beanstalk is only as good as the application environments it supports. Luckily, Amazon offers support for a whole range of coding and container platforms, including all the popular ones like Python, Ruby, PHP, Node.js, Java, .NET, and Docker.

AWS integration

Deep and native integration with the rest of the Amazon Web Services platform means that you can easily configure your application as you see fit, including choosing different instance types with more or less memory, enabling SSH access, arrange the necessary security, and connect with other AWS services like S3, RDS, and Lambda.

Scalability

You can start small and scale up. Amazon allow you to create up to 75 applications on Elastic Beanstalk, with 1,000 version each. By default, users can run up to 200 environments across all of their applications. And in case your organization needs more resources, you can always request more using a request form.

Provisioning

One of the biggest strengths of Elastic Beanstalk is its ability to provision the necessary instances, load balancers, and other resources that your application needs. You don’t even need to specific anything regarding the size and type of these resources.

Versioning

Easy version management is another hallmark of EB. You can deploy a different application version to a running environment, or even roll back to a previous version, all with relative ease.

Monitoring

When you have an application running in production, it is imperative that you know if something goes wrong, so you can fix it right away. Elastic Beanstalk does regular health checks to make sure your app is running as intended. And if not, it also tries to find the cause and solve it. This may involve launching a new instance that is failing, or replacing the load balancer if it is giving trouble.

CloudWatch

You also get access to CloudWatch via Elastic Beanstalk. This fine management solution monitors your environment using set metrics like request count, CPU usage, inbound and outbound network traffic, providing you an accurate picture of the health status of your application.

Management

Elastic Beanstalk takes the guesswork out of managing your running apps. You can administer your environments and versions straight from the Beanstalk console, and also view logs and restart instances. It is even possible to rebuild the whole infrastructure.

Automatic scaling

If you have an application that runs smoothly on one server most of the time, but see spikes in usage during the weekend, you will need two or three instances to scale up. With Elastic Beanstalk, you can set triggers for adding or removing instances depending on the load. It is very much possible to tailor them to your needs, like increasing the number of servers if CPU usage goes above 50%.

Notifications

Elastic Beanstalk can send you notifications, whenever improvement events and activities take place. For example, when new servers a launched, new deployments occur, or your defined threshold are surpassed.

Learn More about Elastic Beanstalk here